For any real creation, there must be a rage. It takes rage to break through the chrysalis of fear, pride, conventional thinking, our need for approval, or whatever is encapsulating us. Creativity requires the concentration of all our passion, our love, our anger, our rage, and our hatred—the concentration of all of these combined with our sensitivity and our thoughtfulness.
As our democracy has weakened, we have become increasingly ruled by predators and fear. We are afraid of taking risks, of speaking out, of being criticized, of not being politically correct, of being confronted, of offending family, friends, neighbors, and of losing business. Have we become afraid of being free?
Dear Reader, “Few are guilty but all are responsible,” the great religious scholar and leader Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote about the moral state of a people. As a people, we Americans are at a turning point in our history. …
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Creativity sometimes comes out in different and unexpected forms that surprise us. This is the case with The Lady of the House quilt. I found myself wanting to write about a topic that is dear to me, but the creative …
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Hope is a “…state of mind, not a state of the world… It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced and is anchored somewhere beyond the horizon.”
A few nights ago, I was lying in bed reading Miguel Serrano’s book, C.G. Jung and Hermann Hesse. The book includes a letter that startled me in which Dr. Jung writes that, “…the world we live in is full …
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Facing the Apocalypse: A Call for Outrageous Courage, Love, and Compassion From the Foreword of Facing the Apocalypse: Over a decade ago I opened a lecture I was giving by recounting a dream I had during a crisis period in …
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As we wander on these journeys, we find that just like in the stories, we often begin in shadowy places, dark forests of the heart or lonely castles that reflect some of the gloomiest wounded and denied places within the kingdom of ourselves. Along the way, we will meet monsters, strange animals (even talking ones), and extraordinary people like dwarfs, witches, beggars, old hags, and even the devil. Some of these figures are helpful; others try to hinder us or even destroy us. But if we want to follow the maps laid out by these stories and to be transported by the stories, we must remember to embrace the world of metaphor because, in reality, the story is within us.
Every life, if it is going to be fulfilled, is a journey. It is a journey from one state of being to another. It is a journey through the death of an old way of life into a new one.
Where the Death Mother lives, “love is lacking,” and in fact, an understanding of love is rarely even present. Yet “love is lacking” describes the denied conditions of our collective world.